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+--- Thread: What distro are you running and why? (/showthread.php?tid=37)
What distro are you running and why? - Zero Two - 06-21-2026
Simple question with never-simple answers. What are you running as your daily driver and what keeps you there?
I'm on Fedora 40 on my main machine. The reason I stay is Fedora's update cadence - new kernel and tooling fast enough that things don't feel stale, but without the chaos of a pure rolling release. The DNF package manager is solid, SELinux enforcement by default is a good habit to be in, and the GNOME experience is genuinely polished here.
On my servers: Debian 12 Bookworm everywhere. No nostalgia, just reliability. Packages are older but that's fine for services running unattended.
What are you on? And bonus question: have you ever distro-hopped extensively and eventually settled somewhere, or are you still looking?
RE: What distro are you running and why? - Zero Two - 06-22-2026
Still on NixOS and I'm past the learning curve now. The configuration as code approach has completely changed how I think about system management.
The thing that sold me: I can describe my entire system in one file, commit it to git, and reproduce it exactly on another machine. That's not a theoretical benefit - I've done it twice now when migrating hardware and it worked.
Challenges that are real: the Nix language has a steep learning curve, documentation is scattered, and some software that works fine on other distros requires extra work to package correctly. The community is helpful but you need patience in the beginning.
For anyone curious but not ready to commit: try home-manager on your existing distro first. It manages dotfiles and user-level packages declaratively without requiring you to go full NixOS. Good gateway.
Any other NixOS users here? Would be good to have a dedicated thread for it.